Here’s a peek inside one part of a science editor’s job: each week the team meets to discuss the articles that are about to be published in the big medical and scientific journals, which are released to us in advance under strict confidentiality rules. We pick the ones we want to write about and decide how important we think they are — possible front-page news, for instance, or worthy of a short item.

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Scientists reported last week that dogs evolved to thrive on a starch-rich diet, a critical step in their domestication.Credit
Asa Lindholm

It’s always interesting when our judgment differs from that of editors elsewhere. Sometimes we splash a story on the front page and other media outlets don’t cover it at all or play it down (and vice versa). The list below includes some developments that we did cover (because, loyal readers, we understand that you might have missed something) and some that, for one reason or another, we didn’t.

Developments

Yaks!

What’s big and wooly and making a comeback on the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau? “Wild yaks are icons for the remote, untamed, high-elevation roof of the world,” said Joel Berger, who led an expedition for the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Montana that counted 990 wild yaks. The yak population there had been decimated by hunting, much like the American bison population, so the expedition team, which included Chinese and American conservationists, was understandably best pleased to see so many of them up there.

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Rita, a chimp at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio.Credit
J. Michael Short for The New York Times

451 Chimpanzees

The National Institutes of Health plans to retire most of the 451 research chimps in its purview, reserving a few for experiments that can’t be done with other animals, according to a draft plan released last week. Animal rights groups praised the move, which was done for humane purposes. Separately, Lori Gruen, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan, is maintaining a Web site called The Last 1,000 Chimps, which documents when each one is moved from laboratory to sanctuary.

Sleep and the Brain

Older people may have an easier time remembering things if they get a better night’s sleep, a new study suggests. The research, which delved into the reasons that the ability to remember newly learned information declines with age, found that structural changes that occur in the brain over time interfere with sleep quality, which in turn makes it tougher to store memories. The particular type of sleep that is tied to this phenomenon is called slow-wave sleep, and — gosh, darn it — it turns out that younger people are just better at achieving it.

You were wondering what happened to the research teams that caused a stir in 2011 by coming forward with genetically altered versions of the avian flu virus known as H5N1, versions that permit ferrets to transmit it to one another? Fear that such viruses could fall into the wrong hands or leak out of the lab had led to a voluntary moratorium on this type of research, with scientists saying they would hold off until new safety rules could be put in place. Last week, scientists declared that such rules had been set up in most countries, including the Netherlands, where one of the two original research teams did its work, and thus the H5N1 research could start up again in those places. A big exception is the United States, home to the other original research team.

Coming Up

ScienceOnline

It started as a meeting of science bloggers in 2007 and it has become a big annual event: the ScienceOnline conference, which will convene in Raleigh, N.C., this week (Jan. 30-Feb. 2). ScienceOnline is a nonprofit group for people who are “interested in the way the World Wide Web is changing the way science is communicated, taught and done,” according to its Web site. For those not making the trek to North Carolina, of course, there will be a heavy online component.

A Sad Anniversary

This Friday will be the 10th anniversary of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry at the end of its 28th mission, killing the seven astronauts aboard. The accident, which was caused by a hole in the wing of the spacecraft, followed a 16-day scientific mission in which the astronauts studied how flames burn in space and grew yeast and bacteria there; cameras in the cargo bay photographed plumes of dust in the Mediterranean. The event led to major soul searching at NASA, which retired the shuttles in 2011 and is contemplating where to send its astronauts next. (Jan. 28 was the 27th anniversary of the other major shuttle disaster, the loss of the Challenger and its seven crew members.)